Crunchbase: North American startup funding fell 35% in Q3 as roughly two-thirds went to AI, with Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs in focus
Crunchbase data shows U.S. and Canadian startups raised $92 billion from seed through growth stage in the third quarter, down 35% from the prior quarter and up 50% from a year earlier; the drop mainly reflects the absence of new megarounds for OpenAI and Anthropic, and AI companies still took about two-thirds of the money.
Crunchbase News reports that, per Crunchbase data, investors put $92 billion into seed- through growth-stage rounds for U.S. and Canadian startups in the third quarter, down 35% from the prior quarter and up 50% from a year earlier. Deal volume was fairly steady, with late-stage and early-stage round counts close to prior-quarter levels. Crunchbase says the dip is largely due to the absence of new megarounds for OpenAI and Anthropic and does not reflect a broad weakening of the venture climate.
AI remained the main theme: about two-thirds of the quarter’s funding went to AI companies, with a large share coming from big rounds for Databricks, Safe Superintelligence and Crusoe. The largest late-stage and growth rounds included Databricks, AI infrastructure company Crusoe, The Boring Co. and AI coding company Cognition; at the early stage, open-source AI company River AI raised a Series A. More than a dozen startups raised late-stage or growth rounds of $1 billion or more.
On exits, M&A was more active than IPOs. The quarter’s biggest acquisition was Nvidia’s purchase of open model development platform Hugging Face, followed by AMD’s stock deal for World Labs, the lab led by Fei-Fei Li, and Stripe’s August acquisition of OpenRouter, which routes prompts across different AI models. Per Crunchbase data, there were 11 North American startup acquisitions at reported prices of $1 billion or more. IPOs were quiet: 17 venture-backed North American companies listed on major U.S. and Canadian exchanges, with no blockbuster tech debut.
The report says the IPOs that did not happen drew the most attention: Anthropic is reportedly eyeing a listing as early as November, and OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO in June and is expected to debut in 2027. Crunchbase’s data is as of October 2, and seed totals usually rise as deals are added in the weeks and months after a quarter ends.